“One of these things is not like the other,” Big Bird used to croon on Sesame Street. “One of these things just doesn’t belong.” It is fairly obvious that Big Bird was playfully commenting on the fact that Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer is far too good a film for its February release date, a sort of cinematic orphan in a month usually reserved for Hollywood detritus. A prescient story strained through the cinematic vocabulary of mid-20th century Alfred Hitchcock, The Ghost Writer is a sophisticated and meaty thriller. It’s also deliriously entertaining and funny.

Ewan McGregor plays a ghost writer (we never learn his name; he only ever refers to himself as “The Ghost”) given the opportunity of a lifetime—complete the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Peirce Brosnan) after the original author washes up dead on a Cape Cod beach, the victim of a drunken accident. “He wasn’t a politician,” the Ghost tells his agent, “he was a craze.” A statesman who entered office like Obama but left like Bush, Lang is hiding out in America, under investigation by the Hague for war crimes following his authorization of the illegal rendition of suspected terrorists for torture by the CIA.

Monastically holed up in a glass house (you know what they say about glass houses) along with the PM, Lang’s beautiful but frumpy wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) and his personal assistant/mistress Amelia (Kim Cattrall), life for the Ghost is turned upside down when, only days into his assignment, they are beset on all sides by a horde of reporters and protestors. Things go from bad to worse when the Ghost stumbles on to clues in his predecessor’s effects indicating that war crimes may be the least of Lang’s transgressions. Was his predecessor killed for what he uncovered, and is the Ghost next?

The Ghost Writer is the first great film of 2010, a spare, unpretentious thriller with a snappy script and precise, intimate cinematography. The environment inside the claustrophobic, mausoleum-like house is as cold and oppressive as the weather outside—an unceasing, bitter winter rain, where, metaphorically, ground crews participate in a futile game of keeping the residence clear of storm-tossed debris. Tonally, I was reminded of Polanski’s own MacBeth (1971), a film whose settings and actors are similarly soaked through with driving rain and oozing muck. The Ghost Writer, as luck would have it, even has a passable Lady MacBeth.

Polanski bathes his audience in gut-wringing tension, though it is a gambit he rarely consummates—so that when he does make good on the set-up, the payoff is that much more unsettling. The film operates as a paranoid, 1970s thriller, but, while it tosses out a few jabs at Halliburton, illegal rendition and detainee torture, it is ultimately less interested in politics and more interested in embalming its audience in expectant foreboding. The last five minutes are as good as anything you’ve ever seen.

McGregor is perfect as the ambitious yet morally conflicted writer who probably should have spent more time writing and less time playing detective. Brosnan is pitch perfect as a Tony Blair-esque stand-in, ignorant, perhaps, but in no way dim-witted or unintelligent. Williams, an underappreciated actress if ever there was one, plays the role of the maligned spouse with perplexing fire, and though she thoroughly mangles her British accent every chance she gets, Cattrall is present because there are so few women her age who can pull off the character she seems to perfectly embody. Also appearing are Tom Wilkenson and a physically, but in no way artistically, emaciated 94-year-old Eli Wallach.

This is likely Roman Polanski’s final film. The 76-year-old currently sits under house arrest in Switzerland, awaiting extradition to America (a theme mischievously mirrored in the film) for fleeing the country after a 1977 statutory rape charge. Luckily, I am a film critic, not a director’s morality critic—neither Polanski’s fate nor his soul belong to me. But if The Ghost Writer is the last time the celebrated director is ever behind the camera, he will have exited the stage with an atmospheric, suspenseful political thriller that, if not among his greatest works, is certainly among his most pleasurable.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams, Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkenson
Director: Roman Polanski
Running Time: 128
Rated PG-13 for language, brief nudity/sexuality, some violence and a drug reference.